Lecture: Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism
The Centre for Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Wrocław has the honor to invite you to the 9th lecture in the series “International Voices in Children's Literature Studies”
LECTURE: Prof. Macarena García-González's
Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism
DATE: 28 April 2022
TIME: 18.00 (CET, Central European Time)
12:00pm (noon) (Eastern Standard Time)
To calculate the time for your own time zone, see Savvy Time World Clock Converter
VENUE: MS Teams
Event Concluded. Lecture available here.
A long-asked question in children’s literature studies is how the child reads the very same book we (adults) have read. We suppose and imagine. We ask. We assume an important lot. In 1984, Peter Hunt argued for a “childist criticism”, proposing that young readers’ multiple individual responses to literature should inform adults’ critical practice. In this talk, I reflect on how affect theory and new materialist epistemologies could reorient our critical practice in and with children’s literature. Using the concept of childist criticism and Maggie MacLure’s (2013) notion of the “wonder of data”, I follow various encounters between children (and researchers) and the book La madre y la muerte/La partida (Laiseca, Chimal, Arispe, 2016). This book tells a macabre story about a mother that cannot bear to have her child taken away by Death. By following the book’s agency in the research assemblage of diverse projects, I propose possible methodological orientations to post-representational research for children’s literature criticism.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER: Macarena García-González is Principal Researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies in Educational Justice of the Catholic University of Chile. She has a PhD in Cultural Studies and Social Anthropology from Zurich University and a MA in Cultural Studies from Maastricht University. She investigates the shifting relationships between literature, cultural materials, epistemologies, children and social justice working with transdisciplinary and collaborative methodologies. She has authored two monographs —Origin Narratives. The Stories We Tell Children about Immigration and International Adoption (Routledge, 2017) and Enseñando a sentir. Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil (Metales Pesados, 2021)—as well as several articles and book chapters on children's literature, culture and education. She currently leads the research project Literary and Emotional Repertories for Childhood and the research line BioSocioCultural Inclusion. Challenging Homogeneity in Educational Spaces. Macarena has recently convened the 25th congress of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) and serves on the executive board of the IRSCL.
Opmerkingen